I agree with Robert's analysis, and Peter Jackson's works based on Tolkien are likewise far more dark and cynical than Tolkien.
It's like Sacha Baron Cohen said, while frantically running around and to limited extent away from a pack of ignorant angry Americans - it's the War OF Terror. Talion is a terrorist. The West employs terrorist tactics to take down a wide range of modern oppositional groups, from freedom fighters trying to exert self-sovereignty to terrified idealists bastioning themselves with religion to dissident groups in the United States itself.
The problem, once again, is that video games never examine the supposed virtue and righteousness of the protagonist, it's always ASSUMED. The focus is always on the mission, the quests, the saving the world, one corpse at a time - whether the missions and quests are RIGHT in the first place is always assumed, never questioned. What exactly is being saved one corpse at a time is either not addressed or put in vague ridiculous terms, like saving the world from evil.
Video games have no means of allowing the player to within the game oppose the video game itself. All the player can do is either play the game (follow the plot, mechanics, and structure enabled by the developer) or not play the game.
There's no evil in the world. Both Dick Cheney and Osama Bin Laden are wrong about that. We live in a terrible distressed confused world with various powerful groups creating various bad outcomes. Dick Cheney, Osama Bin Laden, the American military, ISIS - none of these things are evil but ALL of these things produce bad outcomes and need to be opposed.
The meaning of "saving the world, one corpse at a time" is the age old mantra - Might makes Right. Talion is blessed by the developer - given immortality, super-powers, the only character wielded by the almighty *player*, and the player is instructed by the game to reconfigure the game world itself (like the American military reconfigures the Middle East), one corpse at a time.
The reason 61% of modern mainstream games are about killing is that the primary ideology of video games is about the player restructuring, redefining the condition of the gameworld. Usually, from one which contains a plethora of "monsters" to one in which the "monsters" have been genocided, either entirely or at least until they no longer comprise a group capable of effective opposition to Talion and others pursuing a War of Terror.
Monsters don't exist. Until gamers understand that, they'll be all too happy to continue with virtual genocide after virtual genocide, waving away meaning with claims of "fun".
Game critics have long been only half correct - games have been said to be about interactivity but most mainstream ones are actually about transformation. Classically, they present a world full of monsters and the player transforms the world into a "safe" one without monsters. We interact with games *in order* to transform them into a better state.
But better for WHO, exactly? Certainly not for the corpses and for the corpses' loved ones, now bewildered and living a shadowy twilight existence of genocided despair, as the Native Americans do now and the Palestinians are moving toward. Better, clearly, for the VICTORS, for the Might side of Might makes Right, who now have additional control of land, resources, and space - physical, cultural, and psychological, to impose their will.
Power has a snowball effect - the more power one has the more additional power one can get. Games are about the protagonist increasing his own power and the power of *his* civilization, with the underlying understanding that this increase in power positions oneself to be more secure and able to effectively increase one's power in a similar manner in the future.
As in the game Risk - the game is only over when the entire map is the same color. Prior to then? Well, it's Kill or Be Killed.
